Xavier
I get off the phone with Principal Caldwell in a blind rage.
Drugs…school property…
…And Kye fucking Knight.
It was the mention of Kye’s name that made my blood boil. Of course it’s him. Hazel would never get high in a school parking lot, that’s not who she is.
She’s a good girl. My sweet girl. And Kye…
If he so much as laid a hand on her I will break every one of his teenage fingers.
I’m clenching my jaw as I storm down the school hallway only a half hour later. For the first time in a long time, I surprise myself by wishing Melanie was here. Melanie would know how to handle this. How to handle the principal, how to handle Hazel. How to handle me.
If Melanie were here, maybe Hazel wouldn’t be getting in trouble at school in the first place. Maybe everything would be the way it should be. Maybe I wouldn’t be so fucked up and confused, and maybe Hazel wouldn’t be, either. It would be my wife in bed beside me…
Instead of her daughter.
I take a deep breath, trying to ground myself, as I round the corner to the school’s administrative office. Hazel and Kye are sitting side by side in the waiting room, looking sheepish. They both look up guiltily at me as I identify myself to the receptionist.
“Dad,” entreats Hazel, but I stop her with a hand gesture.
“Not. One. Word,” I snarl. She closes her mouth, eyes wide, and Kye ducks his head. Too afraid to look at me, that little shit. He thinks he’s the big man who can put his dick in my daughter’s mouth, but he can’t even look me in the eyes when I’m angry.
Hazel’s principal, Ms. Caldwell, and I are beginning to have history. I remember meeting her at a tour of the school when Hazel was fourteen, before she registered. She knows Mel-not well, since Hazel has never been in trouble before-but we also had a conference call last month with Hazel’s social worker to discuss Hazel’s absence. She knows Hazel was abandoned by her mother, and she’s sympathetic to my exasperation, reminding me that while smoking pot is a great offence at school, it’s not abnormal behaviour.
“I’m sure I did the same thing when I was her age,” she tells me with a wink.
In the end, she agrees not to suspend either child, although I was only advocating for Hazel. They’re two weeks away from graduating high school and, “at least in Hazel’s case,” she specifies, “there are no other disciplinary issues. Now that she’s back in class,” she adds.
I shake Ms. Caldwell’s hand and storm back out into the waiting area, indicating Hazel should follow me with a gesture and not slowing my pace to wait for her. She jumps out of her seat and whispers, “I’ll text you,” to Kye.
In the car, she has an alert, nervous energy but doesn’t seem high. When I speak, my voice is caustic with anger, despite my attempt to modulate my tone. “Do you understand that special accommodations were made for you to allow you to graduate high school this year?”
“Dad-” she starts, but I’m too angry to let her continue. It’s not a dialogue.
“Don’t even start with me! What the hell were you thinking, Hazel? You’re skipping school and using drugs? On school property? Do you know how hard I had to work to convince Ms. Caldwell that you’re a good kid who deserves a chance? And you just threw that away.”
“I didn’t use drugs!” she wails. “I didn’t! I was just in the car, okay? I said no!”
“But why weren’t you in class? Why were you skipping school to sit alone in a car with that boy?”
“I…I…I’m sorry, okay?” She throws her hands up uselessly. “I don’t have a good reason. I was just succumbing to peer pressure. I’m sorry.”
Sorry. Her tone is petulant and facetious, not sorry. It’s too much like her mother’s voice when she came back from some drug-fuelled fugue with some toxic movie star. ‘I’m sorry, okay? Geez.’
I’m so angry I’m reckless. I can understand why they say that people see red when they’re upset. The power of my rage is blinding me, crowding in at the periphery of my vision.
With a sudden jerk of the steering wheel, I pull over to the side of the road and come to a jarring halt. Hazel grips the sides of her seat. It’s uncharacteristic for me to be so angry and impulsive, but all I can think about is her in that car with that fucking kid doing God knows what. And I find myself wondering, suddenly, about this kid Dante that she lost her virginity to. Dante, who fucked her. What did he look like? Some teenage nightmare like Kye? A blond, golden-skinned douchebag?
“Show me your panties,” I command her.
The whites of her eyes show. “What?”
“Show them to me.” I’m not in the mood for games. All I can think is that she stole the sexy panties back from my drawer. Visions of Kye’s hands squeezing the flesh of her ass over the sheer lace of Melanie’s panties are dancing through my head.
A bright flush rises on her cheeks as she tentatively pinches the hem of her skirt, looking back up at me for confirmation.
“Show me.” My voice is tight, taut with the inappropriate energy of the moment.
What the fuck am I doing?
But even as the thought passes through my mind, I don’t falter for a second, staring intently as Hazel hesitantly lifts her plaid skirt up over her creamy, smooth thighs, and shows me the small white triangle of her panties.